Pentagon Documents Show U.S. Ignored Torture, Guardian Says

Oct. 22 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. military officials failed to
investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and
murders, according to classified documents examined by the
Guardian, a British newspaper.

The documents cited by the Guardian said that as recently
as December 2009, U.S. authorities were passed a video of Iraqi
soldiers executing a bound detainee.

The documents, given to the Guardian and the New York Times
by WikiLeaks, also indicate that as far back as 2005, Iran armed
and trained squads to kill senior Iraqi politicians and
undermine U.S. and British military operations, the Guardian
reported. Der Spiegel of Germany and France’s Le Monde also were
given advance copies of almost 400,000 documents generated
between 2003 and 2010 by U.S. military units.

WikiLeaks.org receives confidential material that
governments and businesses want to keep secret and posts the
information on the Internet. The group plans a news conference
in London tomorrow.

The U.S. Defense Department “strongly” condemns the
unauthorized release of the documents, spokesman Geoff Morrell
said in an e-mailed statement. Morrell declined to comment on
the documents themselves, other than to call them initial, raw
observations by tactical units.

Iraqi Casualties

The documents indicate that the number of Iraqi civilians
killed was greater than the U.S. revealed during the Bush
administration, according to the New York Times. While the
documents don’t give a precise count, they list more than
100,000 deaths over five years ending in 2009, with some
incidents counted twice or inconsistently, the newspaper said.

Mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by their own forces appeared
to be even more graphic than the accounts of abuse by the U.S.
military at the Abu Ghraib prison, the Times said. The documents
contain references to at least six prisoners who died in Iraqi
custody during the six years covered as well as hundreds of
accounts of beatings, burnings and lashings.

A Pentagon spokesman said international practice makes Iraqi
authorities responsible for investigating abuses by their own
forces, the Times said.

Release of the information poses a risk to U.S. national
security and relations with Iraq, Pentagon spokesman Colonel
David Lapan told reporters earlier today. He said the documents
might identify Iraqis who worked closely with the U.S.

‘Well Chronicled’

“Our concern is the threat to individuals, our people and
our equipment,” he said. “But in terms of the insight captured
-- incidents of innocent Iraqis killed, detainee abuse -- all of
those things have been very well chronicled. Iraq is still
trying to form a government.”

Releasing the material is a “hugely irresponsible step on
the part of WikiLeaks,” Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador
to Iraq, told a forum at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington today.

“I’d really be worried if, as looks to be the case, you
have Iraqi political figures named in a context or a connection
that can make them politically and physically vulnerable to
their adversaries,” said Crocker, who is now dean of the Bush
School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University
in College Station.

“That just has an utterly chilling effect on the
willingness of political figures to talk to us, not just in Iraq
but anywhere in the world,” Crocker said.

In late July WikiLeaks published more than 91,000 secret
U.S. military reports from Afghanistan.

Combat Reports

A Pentagon task force set up after the July disclosures
examined as many as 400,000 combat unit reports, some as brief
as five lines, that could be among the documents to be released,
Lapan said. The material covers U.S. operations between late
2003 and the middle of this year, he said.

The documents the Pentagon examined don’t include high-level U.S. political-military analysis or details on sensitive
U.S. special forces commando operations conducted by the
classified Joint Special Operations Command, Lapan said.

The July documents did contain details of such operations,
including some that described the accidental killing of Afghan
children in a failed raid by Task Force 373, a unit of the
Special Operations Command.

A U.S. Central Command spokesman, Lieutenant Commander
William Speaks, said in an e-mail that his command, which
includes Iraq, is working with the Pentagon review group and
U.S. Forces-Iraq officials “so that we might help manage
controversy that could result” from a new release.

That includes “any leak of information that would put our
personnel, or the lives of others who may be improperly
identified, in danger,” Speaks said.

Morrell said the documents “are essentially snapshots of
events, both tragic and mundane, and do not tell the whole
story.” he said.